Pros

Cons

User interface can be daunting at first.
Reports lacking visualization.

Bottom Line

Fleetio is a fantastic fleet management platform that seeps into every aspect of your company's operations.
The amount of data to handle might be overwhelming at first, but its handling of all that information makes it a winner in the space.

1 Aug 2019

Fleetio (which begins at $5 per vehicle per month) is comprehensive fleet management software that lets you easily keep track of your vehicles, drivers, and even your vehicle parts. Fleetio shows you a lot of data, which can be initially challenging to leverage. However, you'll soon be easily adding vehicles and editing workflows. You can also track your drivers in real time on a live map. The software is easier to use than competitor Teletrac Navman Director and is more affordable than Onfleet and Zubie, which is part of the reason Fleetio wins our Editors' Choice in our fleet management software review roundup.

Pricing and User Interface

There are two different pricing tiers to Fleetio. For $5 per vehicle per month on an annual basis, you get the Pro version, which supports unlimited users, Asset Profiles and Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), Maintenance logs, Data Importing, Support, Geofence Alerts Fuel Tracking, and more. It also includes access to the Fleetio Go companion app, which works on any Android or iOS device. For $7 per vehicle per month on an annual basis, you get some additional features as part of the Advanced plan (which is what we tested). For your extra money, you get to create and manage work orders, track your inventory, set up diagnostic trouble code alerts, and more. You also have the option to be billed month to month. This costs an additional $1 per month for both tiers.

Compared to other fleet management platforms, Fleetio is priced very fairly. For reference, Avrios begins at $1 per vehicle per month and goes up to $9 depending on what edition you choose. Other solutions, such as Onfleet, begin at $149 per month but support a large number of vehicles and are designed for bigger enterprises. Having a low cost per vehicle means that Fleetio is affordable for companies of all sizes, and it's nice to have a platform that is designed to grow with you if you are one that is starting out small. Fleetio is fairly priced considering its robust feature set and GPS vehicle tracking features.

Log on to the platform, and you are immediately taken to your dashboard. This customizable page has all sorts of widgets that you can configure to your liking. Want a quick view of your vehicle assignments? You can easily set that up. Want a widget telling you data about the most recent meter readings? You can quickly set that up as well. You can drag and drop the widgets and resize them as you like. It's all very easy, and it's always a good thing when you can configure software exactly as you want it.

If there's one word to describe Fleetio's user interface (UI), it's "busy." The sidebar menu has 16 different tabs, and most of those tabs have submenus when you click them. At first, it's fair to say that Fleetio's UI is overwhelming.

After spending some time with it, however, it becomes apparent that there is a method to Fleetio's madness. Adding information to the platform is done by clicking the plus (+) icon at the very top of the screen and following the step-by-step guide. Though busy, Fleetio's UI is attractive, modern, easy on the eyes, and makes sense. It uses simple, readable fonts, and its navy blue-and-white color scheme is attractive. The fact that the Fleetio developers were able to make such a detail platform easy to use and understand is a design achievement.

Setup

Despite the sheer amount of stuff going on, finding the information you want and navigating through the platform is easy thanks to some clever design choices. For example, if you want to add any new information, whether it's a new vehicle, service entry, work order, contact, or place, then you just have to click the plus (+) sign icon at the very top of the screen. From there, you will be provided with a step-by-step guide toward adding whatever you want to the tool.

Like many other fleet management tools, you're asked to enter quite a bit of information about your vehicles upon setup. You'll have to enter data such as make, model, vehicle identification number (VIN), and pricing. You can even enter the vehicle's dimensions, weight, warranty information, engine information, wheel type, fuel type, and more. Most of this information isn't mandatory, but if you want a truly meticulous record of your fleet, then you might find that Fleetio is the tool for you. With all of this data, entering a vehicle's information can take either a very long time or no time at all. When we tried adding a few vehicles to our test fleet, it took just a few seconds to enter the necessary bare-bones information.

Adding Drivers is done by clicking "Contact" in the Add menu. Much like entering a vehicle, contact information can be basic (such as a first and last name) to highly detailed (with fields for role, address, and license number, and license class).

We think Fleetio struck the right balance here. If you don't feel like spending a lot of time entering information, then you'll undoubtedly appreciate being able to keep a minimal record of your vehicles, employees, parts, and other information. On the other hand, those who want to pull up extremely detailed information about their fleet at a moment's notice won't mind typing into all of those fields upon setup. Whichever way you go, however, Fleetio has you covered.

Robust Management

Click the Live Map tab on the sidebar and you will be taken to a Google Maps view of the vehicles in your fleet. As long as your drivers are connected via the Fleetio Go mobile app, you will be able to see their location and status through this page. This module makes it very easy to see what your drivers are up to and keep them accountable while on the job.

Speaking of accountability, the Driver Leaderboard tab is another helpful way of tracking driver performance and spotting problems. This gives you a list of all of your drivers, ranked on a variety of factors, including completed trips, phone usage, heavy acceleration, and hard braking. Based on this list, you can easily monitor driver performance. If someone is driving way too fast, then you can see it here and remedy the problem quickly. While a smartphone can track a vehicle's speed to a degree, the best way to track hard braking and acceleration is with a tracker connected to the vehicle's diagnostic port. While a Fleetio subscription does not come with one of these devices, it does integrate with most third-party diagnostic trackers so that you can gather this information and use it in the system.

Outside of checking on your employees, you'll likely spend the most time with Fleetio looking through the Vehicles tab. Here, you'll be able to view the status of all of your vehicles, such as which ones are active or out of service, and how many miles they have. Click a vehicle and you'll see more detailed information. Here is where you'll get the truly valuable insights, such as the vehicle's total cost per mile (CPM) and any upcoming maintenance tasks needed.

You can also create and view vehicle assignments. Say you wanted to have one of your employees perform an oil change on one of the vehicle. You can simply click "Add Assignment" on the Vehicle Assignments screen, select the vehicle and operator, and assign a due date for the assignment. If you've used a collaboration app such as Trello before, then you should find the assignments module easy to use. The Reminders feature works in a similar function; you can configure alerts to remind you to perform service, renew aging vehicles, or update contacts lists.

With Fleetio, you can also keep track of all of your inspections, vehicle issues, and fuel purchases in their respective tabs. Just like other parts of the tool, pulling up information was a snap. We couldn't test fuel card management, but looking around the management module, it looks like it would be extremely easy to connect your company's fuel card to the platform and thereby implement a limited form of expense tracking.

Reports

Fleetio comes with quite a few preconfigured reports based on all aspects of your fleet. These reports, which deal with everything from logging all vehicle service to telling you all of the parts used on each vehicle, are all very helpful in helping you better understand your fleet and what's going on in it.

With that said, these reports are very basic in nature and include little, if any, visualization. This is puzzling because, if you configure the reports to appear on your Dashboard, then they are visualized. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker, though. The reports are still very clear and easy to understand. It's just an odd design decision, especially considering products such as Avrios offer visualized reports.

A Highly Detailed Tool

If you're trying to manage your vehicle fleet, then Fleetio should check all the boxes you need. Whether you're trying to monitor your drivers in the field, pull up information about a fleet in your inventory, understand what parts you have in stock, or just try to see which drivers are performing best, Fleetio is a phenomenal fleet management tool.

However, the tool is not without its quirks. For newcomers, the UI can be a bit daunting at first. We would love to see reports get a little more visual flair as well. These are easy to overlook, however, considering how well Fleetio handles such extraordinary amounts of data with such relative ease. It's easy to see why it's our Editors' Choice in our fleet management software review roundup.

Fleetio

Bottom Line: Fleetio is excellent fleet management software that can help you manage every aspect of your company's fleet operations. Novices might get overwhelmed at first at the amount of data available, but Fleetio helps you handle it all with ease, which earns it our Editor's Choice.

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About the Author

Rob Watts is PCMag's Business Analyst, writing reviews and features for a variety of business applications. He brings years of experience in editorial insights to the role, having previously worked as an editor for Keypoint Intelligence, an independent test laboratory for document imaging hardware and software. He spends his free time cooking and gaming. See Full Bio